Correct. E.g. Bussard ramjet or laser-propelled sailship.

Snowden basically walked out of the NSA with all their secrets; who's to say a few dozen or hundred other contractors didn't do the same thing before him? Everything the NSA knew or had access to before 2013 was most likely available in blackhat circles through clandestine leaks.

Any backdoors in TrueCrypt would be a security disaster, and the NSA has already proven itself willing and able to put backdoors in highly trusted security software. It's also proven itself incapable of keeping secrets.

Worrying about NSA-planted vulnerabilities is not the same thing as worrying about a direct attack from the NSA itself.

If every monkey just sits there typing 123456 over and over, they will only ever crack half the users' passwords.

Well, this is it -- an early test of whether Bitcoin can stand on its own as an underground currency. The crutch of traditional currency exchange has been kicked out from under it. Will the bitcoins currently in China be abandoned? smuggled out? or actually used as money like Satoshi intended?

There are some randomizing anonymizer services which take money from lots of people and return it randomly so nobody knows exactly which amount came from which source....

So... sort of a money laundromat?

I guess by the time we're ready to build this thing, every available spot on Earth will already be covered with solar panels.

Your inability to imagine a reason for browsing without javascript does not mean that there is no such reason.

If Slashdot ever starts requiring javascript, I'm out forever. FWIW.

Using "Classic" "Nested" view with no javascript. Works fine on all browsers and devices. Please keep it as an option.

Does this mean it's technically illegal for anyone in America to say, "I have received no National Security Letters today"? I feel a T-shirt design coming on....

IMHO the best reason to vote for a minor party candidate is to send a message to the major parties: If you move in the direction of this minor party, you might get my vote next time.

You mean, just because I executed a query against my database, the database doesn't actually store anything until I query it?

That's exactly how quantum computers work!

The problem of liability is relatively easy to solve. Define a set of operational standards, then limit liability by statute as long as those standards are met. Update and refine the standards as we gain experience.

A few unfortunate people will be killed by programming errors and deficient standards, but far more lives will be saved by getting the deadly menace of human drivers off the road.

In the case of General Petraus, he damn well needed to be questioned, disrespectfully even, because of this whole mess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal

Why is that whole mess supposed to be interesting to anybody besides the people directly involved? I never understand why cheating spouse celebrity "scandals" are such a big deal.

Lane doesn't matter. Drivers in the eastern US get uneasy if they see a gap in traffic. They just aren't comfortable unless they're tailgating. And they won't pass unless they can see someone else up ahead to tailgate.

Taco Cowboy's experience allegedly happened on 2011-04-11 at 16:07 SGT. The big quake happened on 2011-03-11 at 14:46 JST, which is 13:46 SGT. So neither the date nor the time of the story checks out. If his memory of those particular details is so sketchy, then all his other memories of the experience are suspect -- perhaps whatever caused the hallucinations also disrupted his time sense, or perhaps the entire memory is false. (I'm not suggesting that the story is fictitious, just that it's based on an unreliable memory.)

Even ignoring the date/time errors in the story, we don't really see any evidence of spooky premonition. There had been a magnitude 7.2 quake two days earlier, which probably had a lot of people thinking randomly about earthquakes just before the big one hit.

Every year or so I make a forensic copy of my Windows machine's HDD and use F-prot to scan it on an air-gapped clean scratch system. It always comes up clean. It is possible to use Windows without any active AV and still not get infected. It'll be a sad day if ever universal active antivirus becomes mandatory as suggested by GP.